But I got no responses. Now last friday I went to one of my favourite record shops in town to buy the May 2014 issue of british magazine Blues and Rhythm which carries the story of tenor saxophonist Willene Barton, written by R’n’B researcher Dan Kochakian.

On alto for the cover: Gateway LP 15 from the collection of Armin Büttner.

I had acquired Barton’s LP “There She Blows” a while ago. I knew nothing about Barton then and bought the record purely for the cover. And there is not much about Barton on the Internet, so I was glad to see her featured in one of my favourite magazines. Dan Kochakian is well known for finding out a lot about obscure musicians from the past and if you are interested in Willene Barton, I’d suggest you get the new Blues and Rhythm. Dan’s story features a lot of unknown photographs of Willene Barton and tells a lot about how hard it was in the 1950s for a woman to be recognized as a fine saxophone player. What really got my heart beating faster though was that the picture at the top of this blog post was shown in the article with a caption telling, who these people are. The reason for this photo accompanying Dan’s article is that the man in the middle is organist Dayton Selby, in whose band Barton was playing for some time in the 1950s. On the right is drummer Alford “Al” Griffin who used to play with Milt Buckner for some time in the 1950s (see photo below).

Dan dated the photo of Chamblee, Selby and Griffin to “late 1950s”, but this is to be doubted, since exactly this “Dayton Selby Trio”, as Dan calls it, recorded the LP The Rockin’ Tenor Sax of Eddie Chamblee under Chamblee’s name on February 27, 1964. And I do not think that the band had been together for five years then. John D. Monroe in his liner notes to Prestige LP7321 calls this “Eddie’s new group”.

Prestige LP7321 from the collection of Armin Büttner

So here is some music for your pleasure: First Willene Barton featured with the Dayton Selby Trio playing Barton’s Blues, recorded 1956 in Cincinnati and originally released on Gateway LP15 There She Blows:

Gateway was a budget label “selling to the masses”. So unfortunately the band never gets to stretch out and you can not really hear what Barton was able to do since everything runs under three minutes here and has the obligatory back beat (people say she was able to do a lot).

And here is the Chamblee/Selby/Griffin Trio playing George Gershwin’s Skang! in February 1964 as released on Prestige LP7321.

Since Prestige was a hardcore jazz label, everything is a little wilder here. And Chamblee is someone who should be known among more people. If you ever heard three or four Chamblee solos in a row, you will recognize his sound forever: definitively out of Ben Webster, but highly individual, rooted in the blues but not afraid of modernism – and always with a touch of humor in his playing. If you are into mainstream jazz with an edge, you should try to get hold of his two LPs for Emarcy/Mercury.

I love to look on ebay for jazz or early r’n’b related memorabilia from time to time. A few weeks ago, being a little bored, I started to browse to see if any interesting photographs would come up. Then suddenly I recognized tenor saxophonist Eddie Chamblee (1920–1999) one one of the stamp sized pictures you see in an ebay listing. The seller was offering the photo under the heading “photo of unidentified black musicians” and I had the luck to get it for the pricely sum of $5.

Comparing with other photos of Chamblee I would say it is from the mid 1950s. The other two men look very familiar to me. Does anyone know, who these two might be? Maybe they are members of Lionel Hampton’s band, Chamblee played with Hampton around 1955/1956. They look familiar, but I am not able to place them.

You might as well have some music while thinking about who these men may be. Here is Eddie Chamblee and his band playing Julian Priester’s composition “Swing A Little Taste”.

This was recorded January 20, 1958 in Chicago for Mercury and the band members are: Fortunatus “Fip” Ricard (tp) Julian Priester (tb) Eddie Chamblee (ts,vcl) Charles Davis (bar) Jack Wilson (p) Robert Wilson (b) James Slaughter (d). And it was released on this LP:

“Swing A Little Taste” had been recorded 18 months earlier on one of the first recording sessions of the Sun Ra Arkestra , of which Priester was a member at that time. This version was originally released on the sampler “Jazz In Transition” on the Transition label (go to Robert L. Campbell’s page about Sun Ra’s early years for more information about that session).

While the label on the Transition LP gives Julian Priester as the sole composer of this tune, the Mercury LP “Doodlin” adds one “Washington” to the composer’s credit. This “Washington” is obviously the person to the right of Chamblee on the cover of the “Doodlin” LP (no prizes for giving her full name).

I also acquired another photo from the same seller, also for $5 (it said “photo of unidentified black musicians” again). Now does anyone have an idea who this lady could be? (And no: Just the fact she is holding a trumpet does not make her Valaida Snow!) Or where and when this photograph was taken?

In 1976 Milt Buckner was on tour in Europe with his Lionel Hampton Alumni band, a mix of old veterans from the Hampton band such as Arnett Cobb or Eddie Chamblee and younger french musicians.

In Paris they made a stop at the Barclay Studio to record what was to become Eddie Chamblee’s LP “Ten Years After” for the Black & Blue label (one track was later released on a Black & Blue CD of previously unreleased material by the Alumni band, see details in my Milt Buckner discography).

Black & Blue LP 33097

Only recently I discovered some highly interesting footage from the Barclay studio in Otto Flückiger’s large collection of material related to Milt Buckner. Apparently someone had a camera with him on April 30 and filmed the band while it was relaxing and rehearsing. Unfortunately I do not know who is responsible for this footage. It might have well been dutch Milt Buckner fanatic Kees Bakker. If you watch some of the videos of Milt Buckner that I put up on my youtube account – which definitely were filmed by Bakker –, you will notice that they have the very same camera noise.

Four years ago I found in Otto Flückiger’s archive a 20 minute clip of the Lionel Hampton Orchestra playing Air Mail Special in Prague 1977 with Milt Buckner featured on the organ. It soon turned out that sound and picture lost their synchronicity during the upload to youtube. At that time I did not see what I had done wrong, so I decided to not go through the digitizing process again and leave it the way it is.

But now yesterday I found out that even more footage exists from this concert. So I digitized all 43 minutes that are there (it still ends rather abrupt, so there probably is even more footage extant). Besides Hampton and big-mustached Milt Buckner you get to see and hear Cat Anderson on trumpet, Pauel Moen and the legendary Eddie Chamblee on saxophones, guitarist Billy Mackel and drummer Frankie Dunlop.

I found some more clips with Milt Buckner, and I will be adding one to my youtube account every other month or so. So here ‘s Milt Buckner and his Lionel Hampton Alumni at the Cinema Normandie in Mantes-la-Jolie (France) on May 2, 1976.